Emmet Gowin: 'Everyone thought my photographs were incestuous'

When he started taking intimate portraits of his wife and family in the 60s, it was a totally alien concept. The master photographer shares his thoughts on going public with personal shots – and why after 40 years he's turned his sights on moths

Gowin has often pictured Edith naked, framing the female body as a sculptural form. Photograph: Emmet Gowin, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

"She had just finished dancing with someone else, and as she approached me, I didn't think I'd ever seen anyone so alive." Photographer Emmet Gowin is remembering the night he met his wife, Edith Morris, in the 60s.

Some of the most striking images he's ever taken – 130 of which are on show in a retrospective at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – focus on his wife, his most enduring subject. These "established Edith as a person, and us as a couple", he says. "If you set out to make pictures about love, it can't be done. But you can make pictures, and you can be in love. In that way, people sense the authenticity of what you do."

As soon as the pair married in Danville, Virginia in 1964, he adopted her family – "a feminine clan" – wholeheartedly, and began photographing their everyday life and gatherings. Back then, art that focused on family was a total anomaly. "I was asked by a journalist if the work is incestuous," Gowin says, mystified. "Photojournalism was the modality. You were reporting on a broader world," he says of the expectations that arose during the Vietnam war period. "We've got antecedents now … you can hardly find graduate work where people aren't doing things about their family."

To Gowin, it's never been hard to share intimate moments with Edith and his family. "What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us."

He has often photographed Edith naked, but her nudity has nothing coy about it; it's a plainspoken, fetish-free approach to the female body. His photographs show many tender nuances of womanhood, coupledom and motherhood, whether Edith is baring her breasts, nuzzling into her son Elijah's neck, spreading her legs with a nightgown lifted above her pelvis, or simply showing the nape of her neck. One particularly soulful portrait, taken in 1983, shows her, unclothed, perched on a windowsill with vines framing her. She looks like a wood nymph, yet human in the folds of her stomach and the dip of her breasts. Gowin's images of his wife manage to combine reverie and reality, veneration and humility.

Moreover, his Edith portfolio is a prismatic look at age. The most recent portrait is from 1999, in which she looks rather severe, with round glasses, crinkled eyes, choppy hair and pursed lips. Similarly composed portraits taken in 1980 and 1994 flank each side in the exhibition, magnificently evoking the grace of ageing.

Gowin developed his style under Harry Callahan, at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in the mid 60s. "I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously." His early photography experience still resonates. "As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise – who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence."

In 1967, he crossed over from student to teacher, taking a post at the Dayton Art Institute. Six years later, he was appointed to teach at Princeton, an establishment he stayed at until his retirement in 2009 (though he admits "I could never have gotten into Princeton as a student"). As a teacher, he rhapsodised about creativity so philosophically that, after the first class of every semester, students often had to double-check they were in the photography class they'd signed up for.

It's easy to imagine why they'd be thrown: over the course of our conversation, Gowin quotes James Joyce, William Blake, Diane Arbus, the Bible, Charles Darwin, Maya Angelou and William Henry Fox Talbot. This is not someone who plows linearly through a curriculum. His life and work have been fed by a perpetual sense of wonder at the world, a quest for beauty and an openness to transcendence. He describes his teaching role with awe: "Going over ideas that you love, smoothing them out and presenting them to someone new ... to honour the thoughts you had yesterday tomorrow is a kind of refinement that brings you dignity. It gives you endurance and dedication."

Gowin's work, in the exhibition and more generally, can be cleaved into two periods. The family moments in his Virginia hometown peter out, and give way to sprawling global landscapes. It feels like a brusque change of scope. Gowin photographed landscapes, on the ground and aerially, from the early 1970s onwards. He travelled to the ancient Italian town of Matera, the archaeological site of Petra in Jordan, and spent several years chronicling the scarred topography of the American West.

He realises it disappointed fans when his family portraiture fell by the wayside, but he is unrepentant: "The world is larger and more complex than that. You change as much as the world around you changes." Further, he says: "The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly."

In the past few years, Gowin has made multiple trips to the tropics, studying devastated land and photographing nocturnal moths. On these expeditions, he travelled with a cut-out silhouette of Edith on trips she couldn't attend. "It was extremely comforting to have her along. I got as interested in that as the insect pictures I was trying to take." His insect series incorporates Edith's silhouette, so while they may be a long way from his raw black-and-white snaps in Danville, the affection for his subject is just as heartfelt.